An Orderly Office? That’s Personal

BY the time I started looking for someone to help me organize my home office, where I work when I’m not out reporting stories, it was not a pretty sight: notebooks, papers, bills, cellphone chargers, books, digital cameras and tape recorders, batteries, stamps, magazines, Sweet’n Low and Splenda packets (where did they come from?) were piling up on my desk, the floor and the filing cabinet.

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CLEANUP The authors home office went from chaos to order after the intervention of Lisa Whited, an interior designer. Clutter reigns, and storage space is improperly used.

I found a few professional organizers on the Web and made some calls, without much success. One woman charged a minimum of $250 an hour (because, she said, “I can get it”); another suggested I consider going paperless, putting everything on the computer (not an option, in my mind).

Then one day Liz, the daughter of my longtime boyfriend, Lou Ureneck, came to visit us in our small two-bedroom apartment in Brookline, Mass. Liz, a struggling actress in New York who pays the rent with odd jobs  waitress, party caterer, freelance cupcake baker  hadn’t spent much time with us before, but I quickly noticed her extreme tidiness.

When she went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, she never left the box of tea bags out for more than a minute; the used tea bag would disappear instantly into the garbage. And then, since she was already in there, she’d just clean everything, washing the dishes Lou and I had left in the sink, unloading the dishwasher, scrubbing down the counters for good measure.

I tried to thank her, but she shrugged it off. It was the just way she was.

I was awed, I was grateful. Liz was the one.

“Liz,” I said, leading her into my office, which was also the guest room in which she was staying, “do you think you might be able to help me with this?”

Within two days, she had waded through everything, consulting with me over what to toss and what to file under which category. We came up with dozens  Education Story Ideas, Bills, Manny Ramírez, Poems I Love, Expense Receipts, Letters from Mom and Dad  and she created a place for each, writing the headings onto manila folders that she dropped into hanging files in the double-wide, teak-finish filing cabinet I had bought at Ikea five years earlier, but had never made much use of.

After Liz went back to New York, some friends came to dinner. I raved about her wizardry with the filing cabinet and bragged that she had brought me to a higher state of organization. I was thrilled with this fresh start, and wanted to share my excitement.

“I did that once,” said one of the men at the table, a computer consultant, with a skeptical tone in his voice. “I got everything put away. And I never opened the filing cabinet again.”

“That,” I said serenely, “won’t happen to me.”

A few months later, it had. The cabinet was again serving mainly as a place to put notebooks, scraps of paper and letters I was planning to file tomorrow. The clutter had not only returned but multiplied. I was back to where I’d started, or worse.

I wasn’t alone. In the last decade, as our personal and work lives have become more frenetic, books by organizing gurus like Julie Morgenstern, Peter Walsh and David Allen have packed the best-seller list, and magazines like O and Real Simple have spent tens of thousands of words on the subject. The professional organizing business has grown exponentially (as evidenced, for example, by a 400-percent increase in the membership of the National Association of Professional Organizers since 1999).

Now, as unemployment is on the rise and freelance work and part-time jobs are replacing many full-time ones, more of us are spending more time in home offices (or in the tiny nooks that often pass for them). We may be spending less on furnishing them, but the demand for ways to make these spaces make sense has probably never been higher.

“People are overwhelmed,” said Nancy Black, a professional organizer in Beverly, Mass., for 26 years. “They’re trying to work 24-7. All you can do is help them figure out how to make their environment work best for them.”

But as serial readers of books on this subject learn  and as I learned after Liz’s masterful filing job  organization is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Just as people’s differing appetites, metabolisms and capacities for exercise mean that a given diet will work well for some, not at all for others, differences in work styles can run deep, and often call for customized approaches to the home office. And yet, the experts say, few of us take (or even believe we have) the time to figure out how we really work, or what kind of system is likely to work for us.